(EDIT: By some inexplicable thinko, I managed to misname the principal subject of this article - and in spite of looking at it repeatedly for some time have only just now realized. Outside of the vague resemblance between ‘k’ and ‘d’ and the fact that this article was dashed out fairly quickly, I can offer no real excuse for this; it is simply unfortunate that it fell into the beginning of a long period of personal infirmity and I didn’t notice earlier. MGC. AK)

1. Lies about George Soros by American right-wing pseudopopulists — the better to induct him into their spooky ethnic villain pantheon, a sort of Captain Planet in reverse — generally paint him the exact way Bernard Madoff is: an intensely communitarian, money-grubbing Jew. He is not quite literally a vampire, but he’s been involved in his share of theft and ethnic palm-greasing.

(POINT OF CLARITY: This is the major bit of this essay I felt somewhat uncomfortable about, if only because the subject of powerful Jews is so mixed up with cultural baggage that people are inevitably going to read this as endorsement of something it isn’t. So for the record, within the financier class Madoff is typical as an aspiring big-man but atypical as a Jew. Most of his colleagues - and I would guess even a majority of people funding Zionist charities in the US - are white Christians, largely evangelical protestants. The main thrust of the domestic Zionist project, in which Makoff involved himself as an aspirant capitalist aristocrat, is basically to set specific parameters on the social pressures on American Jews - and, most importantly, to assimilate them as much as possible into a specific subculture with a somewhat unrealistic, idealized relationship with Israel - a relationship that has become increasingly obsolete and replaced with what they regard as an unwelcome cynicism.)

“The Jews just aren’t a big issue in Louisiana. We keep telling David [Duke], stick to attacking the blacks. There’s no point in going after the Jews, you just piss them off and nobody here cares about them anyway.”

former Duke campaign manager, 1990

He is a sort of hypertrophied representative of the worst tendency among the worst, most well-discussed group (the reactionary upper-middle-class) in American Judaism - to live up to its worst stereotypes and fail to live up to the better one. They aren’t a people apart, but they are deeply invested in the idea of it.
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Climate change, on the other hand . . .

It is December 15, 2008. The Las Vegas valley is a city at the same latitude as San Francisco (naturally mild weather) in the middle of the northern Mojave Desert (little rainfall, extreme temperatures). So we do occasionally get snow - except it only sticks at night and in the dead of winter. Las Vegas should only ever get about half an inch deep in snow in late January.

In North Las Vegas, they’re reporting an inch or more. The photos are foggy, with non-evergreens - trees which normally only start to brown and die around Christmas, because we have no autumn - covered in snow.

We’ve been through fog this winter so thick visibility was limited to feet. I know most of you are probably from temperate climates, so I want you to imagine a climate where it is spring and fall for about two weeks, winter for about a month, and summer for the rest of the year. We get so hot that you can fry an egg on the sidewalk in February. We get torrential rain in the early winter that has been taking place in the first weeks of November.

Before the year is out people will have slipped and killed themselves on black ice around the Strip.

I wish there was something funny I could say about this, but the capital of the Mojave is covered in more snow than New York got at any point in 1999. I love snow and all, but I’m actually pretty fucking terrified right now.

December 14, 2008 — Peking. Like the Greatest Generation’s doughty moral struggle against our implacable enemies, the show is over but the fallout and thousands upon thousands of incinerated schoolchildren remain. These are the secrets of the election and its candidates that - while shared by other intrepid truth-seekers elsewhere - are published by It Is *Dancing*!!!! as an exclusive Internet scoop. Ladies and gentlemen, hold onto your dicks, cuz here come the mohel:

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Nuuuuh! Looks like the paranoid lefties’n Realist swine think a coupla troops add up t’martial law! Hyuk-hyuk-hyuk.

Jesus Christ. While I’m used to how consistently wrong the establishment’s favorite line (back the badge, then backpedal) winds up being, it’s rare to see it revealed wrong so goddamn quickly. The militarization of the convention police departments (especially the RNC’s) was regarded as a necessary precaution against radicals; and even reliable liberals ignored what amounted to the decision of the securitarian establishment to throw the Third Amendment out (evidently out of spite, because Jesus, the third amendment? Was ignoring fishing licensing too much work or something?) - and now we have clear signs that the country plans to have a full division stationed domestically - and live.

Falling empires tend to take one of two trajectories: a grand moment of clarity and the sloughing of the imperial clothes after a bitter external struggle (the Netherlands; France; the UK) or violent, overcompensatory oppression of their home subjects in ways pioneered in the Empire (Russia). I was hoping that we would have the former; turns out that our professional death-squad cheerleaders can’t stand the thought of our dwindling veto power over our subjects’ destiny will be the end of civilians being destroyed with M16s. Sorry, blacks!